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Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Tourists often marvel at the number of rich and varied bookstores along Paris streets. Right across from Notre Dame Cathedral is one of the city's most famous independent bookstores, Shakespeare and Company. Inside, every inch of space is crammed with books and readers. The city buys buildings in high-rent districts and tries to keep a core of 300 independent bookstore by offering booksellers leases at an affordable price. 'We have to keep our identity,' says Lynn Cohen-Solal, 'because if we don't, all the shops are exactly the same in Paris, in London, in New York, in New Delhi, everywhere.' Now Eleanor Beardsley reports at NPR that the French government has accused Amazon of trying to push the price of physical books too low and is limiting discounts on books to ensure the survival of its independent booksellers. France's lower house of parliament has unanimously voted to add an amendment to a law from 1981, known in France as the Lang Law which sets the value of new books at fixed prices and only allows retailers to lower books' set price by 5%, in an effort to regulate competition between booksellers and to promote reading. Guillaume Husson, spokesman for the SLF book retailers' union, says Amazon's practice of bundling a 5 percent discount with free delivery amounted to selling books at a loss, which was impossible for traditional book sellers of any size. 'Today, the competition is unfair,' says Husson. 'No other book retailer, whether a small or large book or even a chain, can allow itself to lose that much money,' referring to Amazon's alleged losses on free delivery. Amazon spent $2.8 billion on free shipping worldwide last year to gain a competitive advantage. The bill limiting Amazon's price reductions in France still has to pass the Senate to become law. In a statement, Amazon said any effort to raise the price of books diminishes the cultural choices of French consumers and penalizes both Internet users and small publishers who rely on Internet sales."

...at which point they jack up the prices enough to make up for all those lost years.

...Except - They kinda don't.

Amazon crushes the local competition by offering a lower price, period.

TFA describes the situation as Amazon selling at a loss - Nothing more than cultural protectionist bullshit. Looking at the reality of the situation, Amazon has the buying power to make the publishers sell to them at a price where Amazon can sell below list and offer free shipping and still make a profit on the sale.

When regional players cannot compete even with taxpayer support (as these french bookstores are), then they should go out of business. Who says brick and mortar bookstores need to exist and we all need to pay higher prices for books in order to keep then artificially alive?

When regional players cannot compete even with taxpayer support (as these french bookstores are), then they should go out of business. Who says brick and mortar bookstores need to exist and we all need to pay higher prices for books in order to keep then artificially alive?

Dirt-world stores do have an advantage that they seem to miss. One can pick up and look at a book in person before buying it, for example. The dust jacket can be a work of art, like the ones from Chip Kidd at Knopf, that you cannot get, and never will get on any existing digital device. Where they fall on their face is in some of their policies that worked fine a century ago, but are completely outdated now. Like demanding to returning unsold stock to the publishers.

The point is, people are voting with their money. It may be nice to hang out at a bookstore, but the combination of lower price, vastly greater selection (as in 1000 times greater), and convenience of shopping from home obviously wins out. One justification for keeping the physical stores around Paris might be tourism but when you put it that way - i.e they are charging the taxpayers to decorate the city with bookstores - it does seem kinda silly. It's really just a preference of the ruling elite. They don

but the problem is it's not the right answer. It's not about brick and motar, it's about there being only 1 company you buy everything from. That's Amazon's long term goal, and they're not shy about pointing it out. It's why they have so many investors even though their profit margin is so bad. The investors are expecting Amazon to drive the competition out, jack up the prices (and their profits) and then there'll be nothing anyone can do about it.

So when you say they should go out of business, that's only true if you completely ignore what the people of France (and people in general) desire and what's in their best interests. That's fine if you're the sort who believes in dog eat dog, winner take all capitalism. For the rest of us we support the regional players anyway.

To put it in terms that fit your world view: it's kinda like what Chairman Mao did with crops: He told everyone to double plant. A bad idea that sounds good on paper, has good gut feeling and 'truthiness'. Instead of double the food you had famine. It's the same thing with Amazon. It sounds good on paper to let the weaker players die out. And on a gut level it seems like the right thing to do. But it blows up in our faces. Instead of a cornucopia of cheap goods you'll be struggling to come up with the money for basic necessities.

If I can make the same product you can for less, you should go out of business.

Amazon doesn't make anything, they just force the publishers to sell wholesale for less than they do to other vendors. Supermarkets do this to food producers as well, which similarly has put most independent grocers out of business and made out food really low quality.

The system has failed us. We make the laws and we want diversity so that we have a choice of vendors, so it makes sense for us to fix the market. The French are merely acting to prevent Amazon becoming a monopoly.

Amazon doesn't make anything, they just force the publishers to sell wholesale for less than they do to other vendors.

"Force" is a pretty strong word. I've never heard of an Amazon purchasing agent carrying a shot gun into a publishers office.Amazon negotiates for a lower price on a large quantity of books. The publisher snaps at the chance to sell half a million copies at once.Amazon sells those books taking less profit than the next retailer.

Substitute Plastic Dog Food dishes or 10 penny nails for books and the same bulk price negotiation happens.Its the same product, distributed more efficiently.

Amazon doesn't make anything, they just force the publishers to sell wholesale for less than they do to other vendors.

Then shouldn't you rather be complaining about the publishers charging too much, period? People obviously want books for cheaper, and that's why the majority of them are buying from Amazon, instead of little bookstores. Because, according to what you just wrote above, Amazon is able to negotiate better prices from the publishers.

The system has not failed you. Just leave it be, because all you'll end up doing is distorting the marketplace. As if it isn't already distorted enough with all the government re

I would certainly hope they are both selling the same species. I don't think consumer protection laws would allow a store to tell someone they are buying a tomato when, in fact, they are buying a beet.

Well yeah, and in fact you can buy more than one variety of tomato at wal-mart. I often buy roma tomatoes to make salsa as roma tomatoes are a little juicier, and the roma tomatoes at wal-mart taste the same as the roma tomatoes at whole foods. Same with cherry tomatoes for salads.

Actually they do. They provide a service as well. Providing a better service for less has similar results to providing a better product for less.

In what way is Amazon's "service" better? Mostly, they have a huge inventory and cheap prices. That's about it. Whenever I've had to actually deal with Amazon for actual customer service, my generally experience has been fair to poor.

Traditional book stores often provide much richer and interesting "service," not to mention the experience of shopping, browsing, interacting with the community of local people who shop at a store, etc. That may not be valuable to you, but it is added "service." What dri

In what way is Amazon's "service" better? Mostly, they have a huge inventory and cheap prices. That's about it.

Well there's that, the fact that items get delivered fast (often the stuff they promise to me in two days comes overnight, and I don't even live near a distribution center) and the fact that returning items is dead simple and they even pay for the return shipping. Also a book I bought from them had a mangled cover, I called to complain about it and they just refunded me $35 (the book cost $80,) and they didn't even want the book back.

That's not a good analogy. Whole Foods is a giant corporate structure whose goals are only marginally better than Walmart. Whole Foods isn't terrible, but its version of "organic" and "wholesome" foods is more about making customers feel better about what they're eating, rather than necessarily providing a consistently better product.

You've got that way off. Organic itself is more about making customers feel better about what they're eating, it has even been scientifically proven to be so. Unscientifically as well: Look at how the girl comments on how good the organic banana is compared to the non-organic one in this video (it's short)

Only it's the same fucking banana. A few of the shoppers admit they just want organic just because of how it makes them feel, nothing to do with the actual food itself. It's like paying extra for holy water just because it is blessed, even though nothing about the water has changed. Organic is just the new age holy water.

If GMO were being used to breed better, tastier, more diverse types of tomatoes, I might actually be interested in eating them.

That's not what people actually want. You yourself might claim as such, but chances are you won't actually follow that line of thinking when it comes to your palate. Most people like a specific flavor and tend to want to stick to its distinct taste, only changing when in their head they specifically seek change, or are otherwise forced to. Most people don't consciously realize this. Coca-Cola found this out the hard way back in the 80's. Look at high fructose corn syrup. Most Americans say they want real sugar, but when they taste foods they're already used to only with real sugar instead of HFCS, they tend to prefer the HFCS taste because it's what they're used to. Pepsi actually sells their soda brands with real sugar in the US under the throwback moniker, but most people don't buy them - instead mostly foreigners and immigrants buy them because that is the taste that they are used to, which makes it profitable enough to keep on the shelves.

The banana industry went through hell when they had to switch from the gross michel to the cavendish banana. There are all kinds of different varieties of banana out there, but people just wanted the gross michel because it was the flavor they were used to. When the gross michel was killed by a fungal plague, the industry had to switch to the cavendish. Well good because as you say, people want variety right? Wrong. It sold like shit for a while until people finally got used to the new flavor.

It's amazing what a bad job our schools are doing in explaining the basics of free market economy. Free market is nothing like jungle. In the jungle the you survive through physical force, in the free market you survive by serving your customer better than the other guy. The "power" Amazon has comes from serving A LOT of customers who voluntarily give it their money. They do it not just because of the price, but also because of selection and convenience. If people wanted to buy from French book stores, they

...and part of that relates to how large your corporation is. If you have more money, you can use that money in order to be a bully. It's the capital in capitalism.

The fact that Amazon has "earned" this position doesn't alter the fact that they could be abusing it and harming the overall market.

As a corporation, they are by definition trying to destroy the market. That's what corporations do. That's why capitalism can't be left completely alone. It will implode otherwise. Both it's fans and it's detractors

just like the french though, or texans(or what state was it..).... with wine-index their books are still stupidly expensive though(wine index is similar to bigmac index, the amount it costs to buy wine at your local supermarket complex to get totally shitfaced).

But if the number of literature retailers is reduced to Amazon, selection is affected. If Amazon refuses to sell a book nobody can buy it. By protecting literature retailers France is protecting the selection of books and therefore literature itself.

Exactly... as the price of books go down, the demand for books increase. This is basic Econ 101. By setting a price floor, you are limiting the ability to reach customers who would otherwise want to buy more books. If I have â100 in my pocket how many books am I going to walk out the store with?

I would assume that the theory here is that other things affect the demand for books as well. By protecting publishers, authors, and local booksellers with connections to their community, they are hoping to create cultural value on books that will encourage reading despite the prices. Those seem like reasonable goals to me.

Exactly... as the price of books go down, the demand for books increase. This is basic Econ 101. By setting a price floor, you are limiting the ability to reach customers who would otherwise want to buy more books.

No matter how cheap books are, you are still only able to read one or two per day. Therefore the demand is capped. On the other hand, two books are not inerchangeable unless they're copies of the same book; even if Amazon was giving books away for free, it might still be worse deal than keeping lots of small bookstores in business and thus ensuring that a single seller doesn't have a total power to determine what books and authors get on the market.

Maybe you should take a few more Econ classes.

If I have Ã100 in my pocket how many books am I going to walk out the store with?

Start with these [gutenberg.org]. If it's sheer quantity you want, that should set you up for life.

By forcing people to pay more for books? Since there are many other ways to enjoy your spare time, consumer demand for books is very elastic, so they will certainly consume fewer books.

And since literature depends on people reading books and sharing their experiences, France is actually sabotaging literature.

Actually, while I agree with you in part, I also think you're missing a fundamental part about the traditional "literary" community that France may be trying to preserve.

The actual volume of books sold does not necessarily produce a larger "literary community." If I sell a bunch of crappy Romance novels and paperback Westerns, I'm not going to produce a group of customers that are educated in traditional "literature."

Nor, for that matter, does it much matter even if I sold cheap paperbacks of Moby Dick

The French seem to not be brainwashed by the propaganda machine enough to harm themselves as pro-WTO trade undermines careers in the global race to the bottom.

Wouldn't Amazon, or a "global race to the bottom" as you call them, make these book sellers more unique? They're independent, quirky, historical, experiential, and stylish... all of which should make them more valuable in a prefab world. More generally, won't all artisan can craft endeavors become more popular if there's a "global race to the bottom"?

Ironically amazon supports thousands of local bookstores selling used and new books through amazon. If you want to figure out whos back this billdont look for mom and pop bookstores look for Carrefour and other french retailing giants. Amazons ecosystem is far more local business friendly than walmart or carrefour.

People love to selectively pick 'n choose which benefits of free market capitalism they allow themselves to enjoy and which they wag their fingers at with disdain and want eliminated. Problem is, other people may have an exact opposite set of priorities as you and push to have your luxuries eliminated instead. It can't work both ways. This is why free markets have done more to support personal liberties and choice than all the other failed 'personalized' ideologies combined. Don't tell me what I can buy and

Protectionism is protecting some uncompetitive businesses, not protecting the customers, clients, consumers. Not protecting customer's wallets, but protecting wallets of the uncompetitive, unsuccessful, those unwilling to adapt, restructure, change with the time. There is no virtue in that, do you know what happens with organisms that do not adapt to the changing environments?

Let's examine Wal-Mart in the US as another example. They move into a small town, price everything sold by the competition far lower than cost, and make up for the losses through their other stores. The other businesses close down, the employees have to beg Wal-Mart for jobs at reduced pay, local suppliers and support businesses close down. Then when the competition is eliminated, Wal-Mart jacks their prices up to offset the earlier losses. Now you have a single-supplier ecosystem, fewer jobs, and to add fu

The mom and pop stores in the USA were killed 30 years ago by National and regional chain stores. Walmarts main competition is target, but also publix,amazon, dollar general,etc,etc. When you compete at all levels you have to compete with everyone including constant new arrivals like Aldi, Winco, etc.

Had Congress protected the solar industry as well as it did a maker of motorcycles, our economy would be a bit stronger.

You don't 'make the economy stronger' by increasing the costs of things people buy. If the Chinese were dumping solar cells below cost price, American companies should have said 'give us all you got' and taken advantage of Chinese stupidity.

You probably think the US government should have kept US RAM manufacturers in business when Asian companies decided to own the RAM market years ago. Now they make a ton of RAM with tiny profit margins, while US companies make CPUs with huge margins.

While I don't think that Amazon is the be all and end all of books, big stores like Amazon and Chapters/Indigo (here in Canada) have sure done a lot to bring reading back to the masses. Maybe in a large city there's plenty of market for lots of small independant book stores, but it doesn't work everywhere. I don't even think the small town I grew up in had a real book store. And it had somewhere around 12000-30000 people depending on how the mines were doing. At best we had the popular mass market paperbac

I'm French, and I can tell you this defense of the "paper books" is horrible. In France, e-books are typically MORE expansive than paper versions. How could that be possible? How can you argue that you make literature more accessible by imposing a minimal price?! I'm not a very "the free market will take care of you" kind of guy, but in that instance, it's just the wrong solution to the wrong problem.

How can you argue that you make literature more accessible by imposing a minimal price?!

Because, like the FUCKING SUMMARY said, Amazon has very, VERY deep pockets. They are so big, they will do anything they can, legally, to capture the market (which is a nice way of saying "destroying competition").Amazon can put a kiosk in the sidewalk in front of a physical store and give away the same books in the store. And keep doing that until the store goes out of business. This is basically what they do when they sell books at 90% discount with free shipping. No other bookstore can do that. This is what's called "unfairness".

But let's suppose you don't care for that. There's also the issue of amazon wanting to go all digital. Amazon is all for efficiency and they would just love to sell just kindle books, not physical ones. What will happen to all those paper books, which are too old, or are in a grey area of copyright? They will never scan and sell those. They will be lost forever, ending up with just a handful of copies scattered in a few libraries around the world. Very accesible, right?

And of course, let's not forget about all those "banned" books. Are there any banned books in France? I don't know. Will there be? With the growing muslim population there, YES.

What will happen to all those paper books, which are too old, or are in a grey area of copyright? They will never scan and sell those. They will be lost forever, ending up with just a handful of copies scattered in a few libraries around the world.

And what would happen to them without Amazon? If they're in a "grey area of copyright" no-one's going to reprint them either. The copies which exist today are all the copies that will ever exist, scattered in a few libraries until they run out of shelf space and t

Also, I forgot, many of these books are published by small editors. In Argentina you have a ton of libraries in Corrientes street in Buenos Aires. Some are big chain stores, others are small independent. The independent ones are highly specialized. Some sell only used books, others only sell legal books. Some sell books in english, others sell only books about poetry, arts, comic books. There are even huge collections of vintage porn magazines. And if Buenos Aires has a lot of libraries, I don't want to ima

How is this any different from the present situation? Do you think that Amazon will print books that have gone out of print because they were too old and are being kept in copyright limbo by the publisher? Do you think that independent booksellers carry those in their inventory? Obviously not since no publisher will want to reprint a book whose copyright status is not clear. That leaves used copies, which Amazon also sells. Your argument makes no sense whatsoever: if a publisher wants to keep a book in prin

Amazon doesn't sell used books. They have a marketplace of independent sellers who do that. For a minimum profit. They also bought the largest used books marketplace, Abebooks.

My last sentence is real and you're just blind if you don't believe it. Just look at all the muslim countries. Alcohol is prohibited. Pornography is prohibited. And they can easily ban anything they want. Stupid theocracies run by fanatics. I'd like it to be just a lie, or just a bad apple among the muslim countries. But it's not the

France isn't a theocracy. It'd take much more than one man's decree to ban things the same way Muslim countries do. On top of that, having a large group of Muslims ban things based on their beliefs isn't bad - it's only bad when it's forced upon a large group of other people. I think it's a shitty way to live, but they're more than welcome to have their own non-fun in their neck of the woods.

So a bunch of wealthy Parisians get to shop in pretty bookstores, while the rest of France pays inflated prices to Amazon, increasing their profit margins. This is win-win for special interests and the wealthy.

Yeah, I've noticed it in Cape Town too.
Bookstores are closing or downsizing. There are fewer serious books and more "bestsellers", chick-lit, and dumbed-down stuff.
I have fond memories of sitting at my stammtisch in my favourite cafe in the 60's reading French paperbacks and cutting the pages as I went.
Cutting the pages: a lost experience...
Ho hum.
Mac

I've heard similar suggestions made in New York to San Francisco to here in Austin, which AFIAK has the US's largest remaining independent bookstore.

Let's be honest, though. This isn't about buying books and it certainly isn't about literacy or encouraging reading. It is about the experience of having a culturally 'cool' place to go and drink coffee and browse and hang out.

This is one of the hypocrisies of the left: they want affordable housing for everyone right up until affordable housing means building tract homes in places that might damage the 'character' of their neighborhoods. This may well be the case, but I'm not aware of how to elevate thousands of people to middle class homeownership without having a place to put them, and if you are claiming to be an ally of the working class, you are putting them at arm's length through measures like these that preserve admittedly cool perks for the wealthy urban elite while making it more difficult for your average Jean to buy books because he's not only subsidizing the rich coffee shop yuppie, his discretionary income now only permits him X-n books.

I have a really hard time thinking poorly of Amazon for making books available to everyone at a really low cost. I do feel for the mom-and-pop bookstores, but from a socieital perspective that's a trade-off I'm willing to make. I run a business and if my business became obsolete because of something that had tremendous benefits for everybody, I'd adapt and find a new business. Ain't no guarantees in this world and statism is the tired old answer that always ends the same way.

It has been 170 years since the famous petition [bastiat.org] to French Parliament to protect candle maker from unfair competition from a certain celestial body. Did they learn nothing? Why prop up an obsolete and failed industry at the expence of taxpayers, consumers and competitors?

Maybe use that money to preserve some outstanding paper book editions? Or poll that money to create a free e-book repository to educate the masses who don't have the resources to pay for books $60 a pop? Today we have the technology to bring literacy and education FOR FREE to every ghetto and remote corner of the world, yet a certain Mikey Mouse character prefers and inifinite copyright, and universal as well (Thanks, WTO!)

The French government already has agreements with Amazon to subsidize it each time it creates a new job (between 3400 and 5000 euros per job)...http://www.huffingtonpost.fr/2012/11/27/amazon-aide-publique-subvention-fisc-impots-france_n_2197220.html

Oh, and Amazon doesn't pay taxes in France, but in Luxemburg, contrary to the bookshops.

Actually, instead of adding yet another layer of regulation that will soon be circumvented, the governement should just:1) stop subsidizing Amazon (they would open the logistics platform anyway, given their market share).2) come up with a credible scheme for multinational Internet companies to pay their taxes.

The EU is moving to ensure multinationals pay tax based on where they do business, not where they are incorporated or based. The rule will pretty much be this: If you make money in an EU country you pay a an equivalent proportion of corporation tax in that country, regardless of any clever licensing set ups or tax dodging arrangements you have in place. It's a kind of "no bullshit, referee's word is final" law.

Electronic books are extremely resource intensive and require a massive amount of well-maintained centralised infrastructure. It's a huge price to pay for the convenience of "being slightly lighter". I have no problem with people choosing to use an e-reader, but it'll be a dark day in civilisation when the written word is only recorded digitally.

What I'm most happy to see here is France understanding that the country is really a geographical area owned by a government on behalf of the people, with various rights and responsibilities assigned to inhabitants in a way which suits the people. I am required to respect private law merely as a result of being born, and there is even better reason to require me to respect public law.

I've got a 1940's science book in my jacket pocket. Will the Ereader book be usable in 5 years?

I currently have my metric ton of paper books dumped in a storage somewhere I cannot easily reach. Most of them are obsolete textbooks and some are priceless physics and calculus books in a language my children will not be able to read. On a rare occasion I need one of them but it is now too difficult to fetch them at will.

To avoid repeating this situation I only buy ebooks now, and unlike their dead wood counterparts, yes, I will have all of them in 5 years, taking up 0 living space, in a searchable for

Electronic books are extremely resource intensive and require a massive amount of well-maintained centralised infrastructure. It's a huge price to pay for the convenience of "being slightly lighter".

It is not just slightly lighter, you can hold thousand kilograms worth of books in your pocket. The resource intensive and massive centralized infrastructure is only due to digital restriction management. DRM free book do not have this problem. Essentially, what you are saying is that electronic book are defective by design, but we can fix this and save paper in the process. Don't dismiss new technologies because of a few political glitch.

Can I expect to be able to access my collection of e-books in 40 years? I highly doubt that; it's more likely that I'd have to pay multiple times to shift the books from one format to another in order to access them with the e-readers available at that time. The popupar format is epub/mobi today, it's likely to be something else as technology progresses.

Will we witness a planned obsolescence as has happened multiple times with console games? PS1 games can nowadays only be played using an emulator (if you ca

Can I expect to be able to access my collection of e-books in 40 years?

Unless you're foolish enough to lock yourself into DRM, I don't see why not. Nearly 30 years on (well, 28) and Amiga software can be run in emulators from discs that have been format-shifted. And Amiga-specific files can and have easily been converted to new formats. Except for regular old text, because that still works fine. Or HTML, because that still works fine. Or BMP, because that still worms fine.
If a format works and does it's job, it'll stick around after many hardware and software changes. Calibre already makes it trivial to move between epub and mobipocket (and go to and from RTF, PDF, etc) so I don't see you suddenly being unable to read your library even in 40 years.

EPUB is an XML-based format. Writing an XSLT stylesheet to convert it to any future format is fairly trivial, certainly within the capabilities of many readers of this News for Nerds site. (Look at how Calibre can translate EPUB on the fly when saving an ebook to e.g. a Kindle device). EPUB is no more destined to be unreadable in a few years than the future-proof ASCII books that Project Gutenberg has offered for decades now.

The resource intensive and massive centralized infrastructure is only due to digital restriction management.... Don't dismiss new technologies because of a few political glitch.

Why should we assume DRM can be fixed at the political level when all experience points to the powerful successfully abusing government? Put another way, if we live in a DRM free world one day it wont' be because of the US, but because of India, China, Brazil, et al.

"slightly lighter" to a SINGLE book. Plenty of people have to carry many books to, for example, the university. I walk about 2.5km and back every day to uni. Carrying a bunch of books with me is out of the question - it's just not good for my back.

Electronic books are extremely resource intensive and require a massive amount of well-maintained centralised infrastructure. It's a huge price to pay for the convenience of "being slightly lighter".

I think making paper and ink, printing and distributing books, and then moving them over and over again, sending them, keeping them in libraries that are heated/air conditioned to some degree, etc are probably quite a bit more resource intensive per book. Newspapers more so. And you know the stories about airl

I see plenty of people reading in cafes and parks here in the US. What is disappearing are paper books. people are reading on tablets, ebook readers, computers, even phones.

Sure, people still read, but they read less serious literature than they used to. The entire West is becoming a post-literary culture. France, with its intelligentsia's concern with protecting high culture, is trying to resist that. Paris bookshops tend to stock genres like poetry and drama which are not making the transition to e-books like mass-market novels.

. I'd be concerned if there were some unique paper books that would never be put into electronic form, but even those books are being converted to electronic readable formats.

No, they aren't. If a book is out of print but under copyright (perhaps it is unclear who the rights belong to), it is not being digitized and made widely available to those with e-readers. A huge amount of publications, which would have its audience if it were brought back out of print, is being lost to the digital generation. I participate in the ebook filesharing scene, and for a lot of 20th-century literature, we the community have to undertake the digitization process by ourselves because no publisher wants to deal with the rights situation.

There was never a golden age of literature when everyone read authors that meet your approval. If people are reading more breezy escapism and genre fiction today than they were before, I'd look at why they feel they need that escapism. Anyway, even a hack can write a pretty good book every once in a while -- especially given that most hacks are unnaturally prolific.

E-Books are nice, and yes, I have more than one e-book reader. However, paper books have their place for a few ways:

First, if there is a power issue, paper books are still legible in daylight. If the battery runs out on by e-book reader while I'm camping, either I use an external charger or I'm not reading books until I come back to my vehicle or civilization.

Second, DRM. There is nothing stopping book publishers from denying access to one's title list unless a monthly fee was paid, charging by the page

Meh. Paper books are heavy and take up a lot of space. Good riddance. Protecting paper book sellers is like protecting buggy whip makers when everyone is buying automobiles. How long can you try to hold off progress?

You comparison fails, because paper books are superior in many ways:

1) I can read them without electricity or a reading device.

2) I can read them without requiring permission from a licensing agency.

I guess if Amazon had paid some taxes in France they might be a little more amenable to keeping the status quo, but as we know they make absolutely no profit, oh no, honest, then France couldn't really care less if they were regulated out of existence.

-Book prices are not higher in France than in the US. Of course, there are all sort of books, with very different prices.-Prices are not "inflated". They are fixed by the editors, not by the government, not by Amazon. If an editor wants to sell its books, I guess that it must have competitive prices.

But prices are higher in France for best-sellers, which is what really matters for most people. Take Plonger, the latest recipient of the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française. It's a 448-page hardcover book that retails for EUR19.95. Now take Eleanor Catton's "The Luminaries", which received the 2013 Man Booker Prize. It retails for GBP9.49 in the UK (EUR11.12) or USD16.74 (EUR12.12) in the US. That's almost twice as much, for half the number of pages.

eBay and Amazon are not always cheap for used books though. People have discovered that they don't need to compete with the lowest priced sellers because there is a finite supply of used books. They can price their books at a level which makes them a reasonable profit and simply wait months, maybe years for supply to run out and someone to be willing to pay. The only caveat is you need a large and extremely cheap warehouse to keep all those books.

Replying twice because I noticed something else about your post. What appears to have happened is that the new bookshops squeezed out the used book shops in the are you now live. Well, not just the new book shops, it is more of a general trend where popular shops push up rents in some areas, so that only other popular shops can afford to be near them, and in the end every town is just a clone with the same chain stores dominating.

At least there is more than one bookstore near you. In the UK the only major h

If it takes me 24 hours to read a book, and I pay full price, let's say 8 euro, that's 33 cents per hour. The price could be doubled and it would still be one of the cheapest pass times around. Your investment of time is always bigger than your cash investment for reading a book, so I reckon most people who complain about high book prices actually need to look at their overall spending....and you can sell the book 2nd hand afterward, and you can swap it and get a book for nothing.

Maybe you can buy a few books less, but in exchange some workers can actually feed their families and also buy books. Ask the minimum wage temp workers in Amazons warehouses if they'd rather work in an old-style bookstore for two or three times the wage.

Unless you come up with a new technology or a new method of doing business, there are very few ways to actually provide the same service for less money - but what you can do is distribute costs differently. You can pay your workers less and be cheaper for th

Every library I've ever known is a member of an inter-library loan program, giving you access to the collections of many other libraries. All you need to do is ask for it. This has been very widespread and common for a few decades now. Even if they didn't have that, you can always ask them to purchase the book for their collection, so you can read it. They have a portion of their yearly budget dedicated to buying new books, and librarians are happy to help you get what you want if you ask. It even makes par

You're upside-down on this, aren't you? They already have a free market for books, and your implied criticism is that they don't want it replaced with a monopoly (and a foreign one at that).

And here we arrive at the central contradiction of what you call "free" markets. They will always tend toward monopoly (or collusion among oligopolies, which is essentially the same thing), because monopoly profits are always higher than the sum of profits in a competitive market. It's always worthwhile for the big fish